Auxiliary Solution Resource: Agile

Who to contact

PMM	TMM
Aathira Nair (@anair5)

The Market Viewpoint

Agile Planning and Management

By empowering teams, embracing change, and focusing on delivering value, Agile methodologies have transformed software development. Agile teams create more relevant, valuable, customer-centric products, more quickly than ever.

Development teams accelerate the delivery of value with iterative, incremental, and lean project methodologies including Scrum, Kanban, Extreme Programming (XP), and more. Large enterprises have adopted Agile at enterprise scale through a variety of frameworks, including Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), Spotify, Large Scale Scrum (LeSS), and others. GitLab enables teams to apply Agile practices and principles to organize and manage their work, whatever their chosen methodology. These new methodologies bring new challenges.

Agile is not a single methodology, but a set of guiding principles embraced by many methodologies in many ways. There is no single “best” way to plan and manage an Agile enterprise, and older project planning tools are often insufficiently flexible to address the needs of a given implementation.

This functionality gap leads to poor project estimation, planning, and progress tracking. Furthermore, Agile methodologies can create confusion between teams and throughout the enterprise, where even well-documented Agile processes may not map to traditional success metrics and waterfall financial planning.

Organizations need better ways to manage projects, programs, and portfolios using Agile. They need to better:

• plan and prioritize work based on strategic objectives
• initiate work
• monitor the progress of that work in progress
• collaborate on work, across teams, throughout the product lifecycle
• control and optimize the flow of work
• close work items when completed
• measure the value created by that work
• communicate that value throughout the organization, regardless of other methodologies in place

Market Leaders

GitLab

GitLab was named a ‘Leader’ by Gartner in their 2021 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Agile Planning Tools after entering the report as a Visionary just two years prior and being a fairly recent entrant into the space.

Gartner, “Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Agile Planning Tools,” Bill Blosen, Mike West, Deacon D.K Wan, Akis Sklavounakis, Keith Mann, Wan Fui Chan, Hassan Ennaciri, April 20, 2021.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in our research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose._

Atlassian

Average annual revenue growth of 40% over the last five years, ~$2B total revenue in 2020, and demand for remote working capabilities and SaaS during the global pandemic have propelled Atlassian (TEAM) to a $84B market capitalization as of 08-17-2021.

Atlassian has consistently increased its market footprint through strategic acquisitions that would allow its complimentary products to organically self-propagate through enterprises. At its Remote Summit in April, 2020, Atlassian announced many new capabilities in Jira Align, based on their $166 million acquisition of AgileCraft. AgileCraft, the company and the software, was a former market leader with support for SAFe and other enterprise Agile frameworks; it also featured strong support for teams using Atlassian Jira.

While Atlassian have many products, those most aligned with the Agile Use Case include Jira Software (Software Project Management), Jira Align (Portfolio Management), Confluence (Wiki), Trello (Project Management), Jira Core (Business Project Management), and Jira Service Desk (ITSM Software).

CollabNet VersionOne

In 2019, TPG Capital purchased CollabNet VersionOne from Vector Capital as part of TPG’s $500M equity capital investment to build an integrated DevOps company called Digital.ai, which in 2020 also includes XebiaLabs and Arxan Technologies. Digital.ai provides end-to-end solutions for Global 5,000 enterprises.

Agile planning tools VersionOne and Continuum support Scrum, Kanban, Extreme Programming (XP), and SAFe. Value stream management and portfolio management have been more of a focus, and VersionOne is available as SaaS or on-prem. DevOps integrations include Jenkins, Chef, and others.

Broadcom Rally

As GitLab’s Plan stage competitive landscape section describes:

Rally was the de facto market leader at one point in time, but has seen its market share decline substantially. While it is still entrenched in many enterprises, many speculate that Broadcom has placed Rally on life support.

Rally is part of Broadcom’s Digital BizOps Starter Edition and benefits from the company’s larger presence, history, and product portfolio. Broadcom had acquired CA in 2018, for some time after which this product was still branded CA Agile Central.

Planview

Planview provides a range of enterprise grade project, product, and portfolio management capabilities. Lead by investments from Venture Partners in 2013 and Thoma Bravo in 2017, Planview has been steadily acquiring competitors such as Troux Technologies, Innotas, LeanKit, and Spigit to expand its reach into different markets.

The product, Planview Lean and Agile Delivery, is said to have strong support for SAFe, Kanban, and Scrum, with Kanban useful outside of software development including portfolio management and business strategy.

Apptio Targetprocess

On 02-11-2021, Apptio announced the acquisition of Targetprocess, one of the smaller and younger competitors in the plan space focused on PPM. Targetprocess has rapidly increased its market footprint and, like GitLab, has been recognized by Gartner as a leader in the EAPT market.

Microsoft

With the acquisition of GitHub, Microsoft has begun the process of combining features of teh popular SCM solution with key features from Azure DevOps. Microsoft Project is their leading plan solution that currently owns 15-25% of the planning market.

ServiceNow

While they are an established vendor in IT service management, ServiceNow’s Agile planning tool, the IT Business Management (ITBM) suite is said to have relatively basic functionality. ITBM includes release planning, limited SAFe support, and Jenkins integration, while its main advantage would be integration with the Now Platform and generally unifying development and operations backlogs via ServiceNow.

Trends

• From traditional project planning toward higher-level portfolio planning
• Increased importance of visibility and value stream management
• Increased interest in enterprise frameworks such as SAFe, LeSS, and the Spotify model
• Continued expansion of the Agile use case beyond software development
• Increased importance of coherence with compliance and business leadership
• Increased importance of Agile tools producing, integrating with, and being guided by data

SWOT Analysis

Strengths

• As a single DevOps Platform, GitLab allows organizations to plan and manage work in the same system where they perform it

• Our transparency and accordant willingness to be direct with, and meaningfully involve customers.

• GitLab’s own modern but flexible software, from basis in Git to cloud integrations, positions us for the future and to be agile in our support of customers adopting Agile.

• The growth of DevOps is concurrent and may be symbiotic with that of Agile, and our reputation in DevOps precedes us.

Weaknesses

• GitLab’s portfolio management capabilities are currently less mature than some more specialized competitive point solutions.

• Our MVC-based iterative approach to developing and deploying GitLab can initially jarring to prospective customers from more traditional, less Agile organizations.

• We’re a relatively new player in the market.

Opportunities

GitLab is positioned for the future, with points including our ascendancy in DevOps, the trend toward platforms over DIY point solutions, our strength in DevOps for enterprise customers, and our own modern approach and architecture, optimized for cloud native applications. As a newer entrant to the space, GitLab is also unburdened by legacy code and processes and able to create a new Agile management paradigm that is more flexible and better-designed for coming changes in demand.

Threats

The mergers and acquisition landscape indicates that competitors are working on building or acquiring end-to-end platforms like GitLab, potentially mitigating against a key differentiator.

Larger players such as Microsoft and Atlassian have resources enabling them to close or open gaps quickly in Agile and adjacent areas.

As Agile becomes ever more mainstream, expansion may become more difficult per more stubborn shadow IT and resistance to change.

Personas

User Personas

With GitLab’s unique capability to connect every phase of the Software Development Lifecycle in a single DevOps platform, many user personas find a solution in Integrated Agile Planning.

User personas and their key motivations for using GitLab for Agile planning include:

Parker the Product Manager

Parker the Product Manager

• PMs coordinate feature development and project success, along with general workload. Abilities to monitor progress through commits and the review app, and to validate those changes and provide feedback, are key to their success.
• Over time, changes generate valuable statistical insight for PMs to assess progress with product development and other projects.

Delaney the Development Team Lead

Delaney the Development Team Lead

• Like PMs, Team Leads need to understand their team’s capacity to assign upcoming tasks and meet goals on time.

In consideration: personas from an Agile Planning perspective might include and be named as:

• Scrum Master
• Product owner
• Developer
• Tester/QA
• Project managers
• Product managers

Buyer Personas

Purchasing for Integrated Agile Planning may not require executive involvement, with one possible exception being the influence of the VP Application Development.

Erin the Application Development Executive (VP, etc.)

Erin the Application Development Executive (VP, etc.)

• Erin is a strategic leader focused on business challenges and the big picture.
• Erin’s top goal is predictable business results.

Industry Analyst Resources

• Gartner, “Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Agile Planning Tools,” Bill Blosen, Mike West, Deacon D.K Wan, Akis Sklavounakis, Keith Mann, Wan Fui Chan, Hassan Ennaciri, April 20, 2021.

Market Requirements

Map business and portfolio plans to market opportunities

Requirement	Description	Typical features	Value
1. Requirements modeling, management, and analysis	Describe necessary product behavior against which output can be validated.	Epics, Features, Stories, Tasks, Health Status Reporting, and any necessary compliance to manage requirements for regulated industries	Provides a common vision for the product’s end state and an archive of scope changes throughout the development process, Ensures that value being delivered meets stated goals and necessary compliance.
2. Flexible workflow support	Enables events and workflows from popular Agile frameworks and custom Agile implementations	Sprint planning, sprint retrospectives, customizable timeboxes, support for enterprise Agile frameworks such as SAFe and LeSS	Increases productivity by reducing context switching, provides a single source of truth for onboarding, auditing, and reference, removes operational resistance to Agile adoption by working with existing methodologies.
3. Value Stream Management	Visualize an end-to-end workstream, identify and target waste and inefficiencies, and tune those workstreams to deliver the highest possible velocity of customer value.	Custom workflow modeling and measurement, waste identitifcation	Provides an objective standard by which the effectiveness of efforts can be judged and identifies opportunities for high-impact efficiency improvements.
4. Role-specific interfaces	Interfaces that surface relevant information in a context suited to different users.	Boards, roadmaps, dashboards	Allows workers to inspect and interact with workflows without switching context from their primary work tools or sifting through information that is not necessary within their business context.
5. Actionability	Tactical participation in workstreams from any part of the management system	Inline collaboration, drill-downs from dashboards into work items	Closes the loop between ideation and iteration, allowing decision-makers to execute immediately and unblock value flows.
6. Traceability	Understand the history and context of every action	Event logs, exceptions, approval-related conversations	Provides an unimpeachable source of truth for audits and retrospectives, verifies that customer value was delivered as requested.
7. Quality metrics	Usability and value of outputs	Test coverage, escape defect analysis, security vulnerabilities, license compliance	Improve product value, identifies opportunities for training and process refinement, minimize adverse business and compliance impacts of changes.
8. Operational metrics	DevOps efficiency and success	DORA4 metrics: Deployment Frequency, Lead Time, Cycle Time, Change Failure Rate	Identify waste, optimize delivery of value
9. Organizational effectiveness metrics	Efficiency with which the organization collaborates to deliver customer value	Team adoption of Agile processes, time tracking, financial / cost tracking and estimation	Surfaces systemic process inefficiencies and opportunities for improvement.
10. Integrations to external data sources	Provides visibility into and updating of external systems that contain data to management and planning	DevOps, financials, performance monitoring systems	Enables tracking of value that extends beyond scope of planning tool, storage of data in other systems for further analysis

The GitLab Solution

How GitLab Meets the Market Requirements

Market Requirements	How GitLab Delivers	GitLab Category	Demos
1. Requirements modeling, management, and analysis	Allows users to set criteria against which they can validate products using requirements—artifacts in GitLab that describe the specific behavior of a product. Requirements can be marked satisfied by a CI job, and if they are no longer needed, requirements can be archived. When a feature is no longer necessary, you can archive the related requirement.	Plan stage: Requirements Management	Requirements Management
2. Flexible workflow support	Provides multiple methods of timeboxing work, allowing users to manage tactical work in Iterations while simultaneously managing strategic efforts across multiple iterations in Milestones. GitLab’s ability to nest multiple levels of sub-Epics allows users to map to any necessary organizational structure, including those of enterprise frameworks such as SAFe.	Plan stage: Epics, Iterations, Milestones
3. Value Stream Management	Provides out-of-the-box Value Stream Analytics to automatically benchmark the DevOps lifecycle and identify inefficiencies. Allows users to define and measure their own custom lifecycle stages. Insights provides the ability to track and manage custom workflows using Scoped Labels.	Manage stage: Value Stream Analytics, Insights. Plan stage: Scoped Labels
4. Role-specific interfaces	Offers a variety of interfaces aimed at role-based contexts, including Security Dashboards, Roadmaps, Value Stream Analytics, Group- and Project-level boards, and aggregation of all relevant information in the Merge Request.	Manage stage: Value Stream Analytics Plan stage:Roadmaps, Boards Secure stage: Security Dashboard.
5. Actionability	Offers a single system for all work and complete traceability, from planning to collaboration to code changes and their impact on quality and performance. From any point in the application, GitLab users can always drill down into Issues and Merge Requests to collaborate.	Plan stage: Issues, Merge Requests
6. Traceability	All actions within GitLab are logged and surfaced in multiple contexts, allowing users to discover and reference historical data with minimal work. Merge Requests aggregate all related information, allowing users to view the collaboration leading to a code change, the impact of a code change, and all relevant collaboration that led to the change and its aproval.	Manage stage: Project Import / Export Plan stage: Merge Requests Secure stage: Security Dashboard
7. Quality metrics	Run and view the output of automated tests in your CI pipelines to verify/validate code pre-production. Includes Unit tests, integration testing, browser performance testing, code quality, code coverage, usability testing, and accessibility testing. Automatically scan license compliance on each commit.	Verify stage: CI, Code Quality, Code Testing and Coverage, Web Performance, Usability Testing, Accessibility Testing Secure stage: License Compliance
8. Operational metrics	Value Stream Analytics provides insights into how efficently your DevOps processes are running (including Deployment Frequency and Lead Time for Changes DORA metrics) and identifies opportunities for improvement.	Manage stage: DevOps Report
9. Organizational effectiveness metrics	The DevOps Report provides an overview of your entire instance’s adoption of Concurrent DevOps, from planning to monitoring.	Manage stage: Value Stream Analytics
10. Integrations to external data sources	GitLab offers dozens of integrations and an open core model that encourages others to contribute.	Manage stage: Integrations

Top 3 Differentiators and Key Features

Differentiator	Value	Proof Point
End-to-End Visibility and Traceability	As a true DevOps Platform, GitLab ensures complete visibility and traceability from planning and collaboration through development, testing, delivery, and post-delivery monitoring, ensuring complete context to all participants and auditors	Deliver more value with fewer headaches using an end to end DevOps platform
Actionable Insights	As a single source of work across the development lifecycle, the GitLab DevOps Platform allows product stakeholders to move from insight to action in just a few clicks, discovering inefficienies and resolving them in a single system, without context switching.	Deliver more value with fewer headaches using an end to end DevOps platform
Product Development Management	GitLab is the only product that provides collaboration capabilities to Product teams that works not only with source code but also IP, graphic assets, animations, binaries, and general project management issues.	Forrester’s Adopt Product Management to Connect Design and Development states “Siloed Design And Dev Teams Deliver Subpar Software”

Message House

The message house for the use case provides a structure to describe and discuss the value and differentiators for the use case.

Discovery Questions

• list key discovery questions

Competitive Comparison

TBD - will be a comparison grid leveraging the capabilities

Industry Analyst Relations (IAR) Plan (UPDATE AS NEEDED FOR THIS USE CASE)

• The IAR Handbook page has been updated to reflect our plans for incorporating Use Cases into our analyst conversations.
• For details specific to each use case, and in respect of our contractual confidentiality agreements with Industry Analyst firms, our engagement plans are available to GitLab team members in the following protected document: IAR Use Case Profile and Engagement Plan.

For a list of analysts with a current understanding of GitLab’s capabilities for this use case, please reach out to Analyst Relations via Slack (#analyst-relations) or by submitting an issue and selecting the “AR-Analyst-Validation” template.

Proof Points - customers

Quotes and reviews

• List of customer quotes/reviews from public sites

Case Studies

• List of case studies

References to help you close

• Link to SFDC list of use case specific references

Adoption Guide

Playbook Steps

• To be added…

Adoption Recommendation

This table shows the recommended use cases to adopt, links to product documentation, the respective subscription tier for the use case, and product analytics metrics.

Feature / Use Case	F	P	U	Product Analytics	Notes
Plan and track work with Issues	X	X	X	redis_hll_counters.issues_edit.issues_edit_total_unique_counts_monthly	Tracks unique monthly active users that take one or more action on an Issue
Manage complex workstreams across Groups and Projects with Epics		X	X	redis_hll_counters.epics_usage.epics_usage_total_unique_counts_monthly	Tracks unique monthly active users that create one or more Epics
Define long living requirements that link to the code and tests that implement them			X	counts.requirement_with_test_report	Tracks total count of test reports that have been created and linked to a code level test
Use Milestones to timebox work for longer running initiatives	X	X	X	redis_hll_counters.issues_edit.g_project_management_issue_milestone_changed_monthly	Tracks unique monthly active users that associate an Issue to an Iteration
Use Iterations to timebox work for shorter planning periods		X	X	redis_hll_counters.issues_edit.g_project_management_issue_iteration_changed_monthly	Tracks unique monthly active users that associate an Issue to an Iteration
Uncover bottlenecks in your workflow with Value Stream Analytics		X	X	redis_hll_counters.analytics.g_analytics_valuestream_monthly	Tracks unique monthly active users interacting with a Value Stream Report
Use Groups and Subgroups to model their organization’s Value Streams	X	X	X	usage_activity_by_stage.manage.groups	Tracks unique monthly active users creating Groups

Enablement and Training

Professional Service Offers

Partners

• Describe how key partners help enable this use case

Key Value (at tiers)

Premium

• Describe the value proposition of why Premium for this Use Case

Ultimate

• Describe the value proposition of why Ultimate for this Use Case

Direction

• Describe a vision for compelling future improvements

Resources

Presentations

• LINK

Whitepapers and infographics

• LINK

Videos (including basic demo videos)

• LINK

Integrations Demo Videos

• LINK

Clickthrough & Live Demos

• Link

Buyer’s Journey

Inventory of key pages in the buyer’s Journey

Awareness learning about the problem	Consideration looking for solution ideas	Decision is this the right solution
topic page?	solution page	proof points
landing pages?	?comparisons?	comparisons
-etc?		- product page x - product page y - product page z